GeForce GTX 580 vs Radeon HD 6870

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 6870, which comes with a core clock speed of 900 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1050 MHz. It also uses a 256-bit memory bus, and uses a 40 nm design. It features 1120 SPUs, 56 Texture Address Units, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Benchmarks

These are real-world performance benchmarks that were submitted by Hardware Compare users. The scores seen here are the average of all benchmarks submitted for each respective test and hardware.

3DMark Fire Strike Graphics Score

GeForce GTX 580		4956 points
Radeon HD 6870		2870 points
	Difference: 2086 (73%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 6870		151 Watts
GeForce GTX 580		244 Watts
	Difference: 93 Watts (62%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the GeForce GTX 580 should be quite a bit faster than the Radeon HD 6870 overall. (explain)

GeForce GTX 580		192384 MB/sec
Radeon HD 6870		134400 MB/sec
	Difference: 57984 (43%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6870 should be a little bit (approximately 2%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 580. (explain)

Radeon HD 6870		50400 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 580		49408 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 992 (2%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 580 is superior to the Radeon HD 6870, and very much so. (explain)

GeForce GTX 580		37056 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6870		28800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 8256 (29%)

Please note that the above 'benchmarks' are all just theoretical - the results were calculated based on the card's specifications, and real-world performance may (and probably will) vary at least a bit.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the video card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip could possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.